Sinners, the 2025 horror film directed by Ryan Coogler, is a powerful addition to the canon of Black horror, a subgenre that explains and explores the traumas of the Black experience.
Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, the film follows twin brothers returning from a successful bootlegging career in Chicago with the intention of starting a juke joint. Having fled the South to escape racism — only to find it in play with different tactics up North — their desire to build a place that would be “for us, by us” is complicated by structural racism from the white residents. They face intimidation from the Klan, threats of lynching and the use of chain gangs.
The Black workers also face economic violence via the community’s lack of legitimate money due to the sharecroppers being paid with scrip, which is only good at the company store. We see the combination of both forms of violence through the destruction of Black-owned towns by those who saw Black prosperity as an insult to their own struggle under a difficult economic system.
The strength and history of the Black community is evoked beautifully in an era-spanning musical scene, which unites people across race, sex and class lines in joyous cultural exchange. The multiracial juke joint patrons dance to the blues and add to it with their own cultures and experiences. This is contrasted with the cultural imperialism and imposed uniformity represented by the figurative and literal vampire, Remmick. Sinners illustrates the two paths that oppressed groups can take when fighting back: following in the oppressor’s footsteps as Remmick does, or standing steadfast and building movements against them, as the survivors eventually do.
The film also features the complexities of genuine cooperation and safety between Black and white communities. While Sinners shows the common enemy and struggles between them, it simultaneously shows the reasons the Black community has to distrust and fear the white community — the physical and economic violence and cultural theft mirror concerns that echo to this day. Coogler complicates the racial dynamics in the film by showcasing how class divides the white community and by including a Chinese family who must navigate racial tensions while not being firmly in one of the fixed racial categories. The film also depicts the Choctaw tribe as stewards of the land that the settlers live on, and as protectors against the vampiric forces of capitalist extraction and cultural theft.
Sinners ultimately highlights a key to resistance for both the communities in the film and the working class in the real world. While the vampire class benefits from pitting us against each other, survival — whether against literal or capitalist vampires — is possible if we can see through divisions and build solidarity.
